Judge dismisses Apple lawsuit over iMessage blocking to Android

The lawsuit was filed against Apple by some infuriated ex-users of the Apple iPhone. The plaintiffs claimed that messages from Apple’s mobile devices to Android devices were intercepted on the way by the Apple iMessage app, which blocked the messages from being sent.

The plaintiffs said in their compliant that, when they switched the Android platform in 2012, they could not receive the messages which were sent by the iPhone-using friends. They further added that Apple’s practice of iMessage blocking to Android was so infuriating that some Android users decided to switch back to Apple’s iOS mobile operating system.

The bug which caused the iMessage app to block messages sent from iDevices to Android devices was fixed by Apple in November 2014, after the complaints received from a number of users who had switched from iOS to Android.

In her Friday ruling in the case, Judge Koh rejected the plaintiffs’ request to grant class-action status to the lawsuit. Throwing out the case entirely Judge Koh said that the plaintiffs could not prove that the iMessage bug was intentional on Apple’s part. Moreover, the plaintiffs could not actually demonstrate the alleged Android-blocking issue with the iMessage app because two of the plaintiffs had actually got rid of their iPhones after filing the lawsuit.